Which card and where am I?

This has been an ugly week. My fibromyalgia has made me a total wreck. We've had a couple small storms blow through this week, and I'm very sensitive to weather, so I suppose that's what's affecting me.

This flare-up came with pain, fatigue, and "fibro-fog": when your brain just doesn't seem to work right. You can't process information, talk, connect thoughts, like you would on a normal day.

Yesterday I had to run to the grocery store, just to pick up a few things. When I was checking out, I kept running my discount club card through the scanner, but it wasn't picking it up. Finally, the clerk asked me for my card.

He looked at it and asked, "Don't you have a SooperCard?"

I said, "Yes," wondering why he would ask such a question.

"This is a Safeway card."

I had to think for a minute to figure out what he was telling me... I had given him the discount card for the wrong store and hadn't realized it. At that moment I wasn't even sure which store I was standing in. I gave him an embarrassed smile and asked if he wanted the correct card. He said he didn't need it because the Safeway one worked anyway.

To add insult to injury, when it came time to pay, I couldn't get the credit card machine to work. Again, I kept swiping my card and nothing happened. Finally, the clerk pushed a button on the machine to reset it and told me to try again. Ta da! Success!

The poor clerk was very patient, but glad to be rid of me, I'm sure.

These are two tasks I do regularly without difficulty. I've been to the grocery store hundreds of times and managed to use the correct discount card and pay with plastic. It's very frustrating and embarrassing when these things happen in public. All you can do is laugh at yourself and move on.

When you're in fibro-fog, most people look at you like you're drunk or on drugs. Some just think you're a total ditz. With fibromyalgia, you look "normal" otherwise... no scars, crutches, etc. People think, "She looks fine; what's wrong with her?" That's one of the problems; people create a story for you that fits their experience.

There was a story on 20/20 about Kevin Connolly, a man without legs who snaps photos of people staring at him. He discovered that "people really need to be able to tell a story, to be able to place you in a context within their own world." I think that's true no matter who you are.

We may say "You can't judge a book by its cover," but we do. We may not judge, but we do try to make things fit into the puzzle that is our world. Those stories we create affect how we treat others, how we react, and what we think. Everything is colored by the lens of our experience. With fibro, sometimes the lens gets a little foggy.